BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

That last line. Wisdom of the Buddha.

“Because they're idiots, and the worst is yet to come.” Indeed it is, says I/US.

But the coming will not be as expected and projected by the MSM Mogul Machine. The Changes will appear as if out of nowhere and be both practically and virtually untouchable.

amanfromMars Jul 7, 2017 4:26 AM [1707070926] …… spilling the beans on http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-06/how-china-increasing-global-power

But you and I can't play. We are being played. ...... LA_Goldbug

Of course you can play, LA_Goldbug. The means for command and control of the memes are provided here before you and your fingertips.

Wwwidely shared words are easily able to both either EMPower or destroy Worlds and Wannabe World Orderers. And such is the Absolute Truth which Systems Administration are terrorised by and terrified of becoming more General Mainstream Knowledge. But one cannot hold back the tides and flow of truths and information which deliver both novel future derivative paths for present placements of greater intelligence.

:-) It is the Inescapable Disturbance in the Force which All Virtual Despots fear ........ for IT Robs Them Blind of Energy and Power.

Deny it and disagree if you will, but you cannot change ITs Path.

Thus is the great dilemma of IT support born

If you make changes without informing the users beforehand, good lord how they'll scream and wail and cry when the changes take them by surprise, wholly unprepared to encounter something in their lives that's slightly different from how it was yesterday. "How very could you?" they'll wail, "And just when I had gotten used to the old way [that I spend the past five months loudly complaining about]!"

But if you do notify them of changes being made, then... well, we saw here what happens, then. There's really no winning move, in this game. The only choice you get, is which way you'd prefer to lose.

P.S> Here's a ponderable, heading into the weekend:

Think Ars will ever add <blockquote> to the list of "basic HTML" supported by their ripped-from-the-1990s comment system? It'd be so nice to have properly-delimited indicators of quoted text, instead of having to play games with italics as most of us do. And if they don't ever add it, will I ever stop trying to use it every time I quote someone, just in case they've changed the system without telling us?

Not just IT support

I had a complaint from some of the people in an office that it got too hot in summer and too cold in winter, so we got a builder in to fit some more insulation. I helped him a bit (ok, I watched) but it turned out to be much more difficult than we thought to get at the area concerned, so after a couple of hours of faffing about we gave up.

The office users told me some time later that it was much better now!

Some monitors are just weird

As a photographer I'm acutely aware of the deficiencies in some monitors. The ones I use at work have an unusual issue, they look absolutely fine until you open an Excel spreadsheet. At which point you can't see any of the cell borders, the spreadsheet just looks like it's all been formatted with a white fill and white border. Move the spreadsheet back to the main laptop screen and hey presto, all back to normal.

The fix was to fiddle with the brightness, contrast and colour settings manually, but even now there are subtle differences between each screen. Doesn't bother me enough to worry though, I'm not using the work laptop for my photography. For that I use the custom PC I built at home plugged into a 42" HD TV :)

Decent boss?

"He's sick of users."

"I... is that news?" he asks.

Do they finally have a boss who gets them?

So, so true

Perfectly encapsulates the experience.

Well done.

So so true.

LOL this reminds me of when our company moved to an EDS managed system with a SPOC at site to fix (basically log issues and replace broke hardware) stuff.

so I sent email to everyone saying in future (iirc was months away) saying when it happens you can't use work pc to do personal crap.

withing seconds I got emails asking about reverting changes that had not yet been made so they could continue on as before.

so I said sure to each person, as they emailed I replied ok your system should be fixed now. all replies said yes thank you.

course when we actually did migrate a few programs required by law to work on aircraft did not work and eds and cio were total dicks about it. so I ended up showing how their idiocy grounded a few aircraft, built up few laptops with no network and made the skin mapping programs work.

from one extreme to the other, unsecure systems to locked systems not allowing us to do jobs.

oh well.

got to tell vice president of major us airline his system was (this is direct quote) bullshit and whomever pushes it should be fined and lose their job.

all on conference call with multiple bigwigs.

and I was just a lowly mtx records clerk...I was pissed.

WORD!

to your MAMA!

Then there's change control idiocy...

Up until about two months ago, I was certain to get whined at during our change control meetings when I needed to restart the email servers to make either small refinements, fix problems, or apply security patches. First it was 'why do you need to restart the servers?' (which had three+ months worth of OS updates that needed to be applied), then it was 'what is your backout plan' (for a system restart. SERIOUSLY.) and ending with 'well, how long will our users be down?' (the ~60 seconds or so that the client takes to reconnect to an active cluster node, which they would barely notice)

EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH. And then people wonder why I have a huge amount of anxiety when I got into these meetings and am also super reluctant to put in any change request at all....

(anon to protect my pay check; I'm not sure who else at my company reads this site...)

Happily

My time on Hell Desk was limited. My employer concluded I was missing a diplomatic gene. Apparently a fellow caught my muttered remark over the phone when I finally dragged out of him the real problem, which was that he really, really could not put his hand on something called a "mouse." I choked I think. He was dealing with his very first Windows machine. Then I muttered something about a "rat."